#quotes&notes

C.G. Jung, The Collected Works, Volume 16, para. 564.

Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures, Lecture 1, p. 15, 24:34. 

Footnote: Later, the notion of psychosynthesis was taken up by the psychologist Hans Trüb (1889–1949), while the Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974) founded his own school of therapy on the term ‘psychosynthesis’.

Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view of the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable. If the primordial images remain conscious in some form or other, the energy that belongs to them can flow freely into man. But when it is no longer possible to maintain contact with them, then the tremendous sum of energy stored up in these images, which is also the source of the fascination underlying the infantile parental complex, falls back into the unconscious. The unconscious then becomes charged with a force that acts as an irresistible vis a tergo to whatever view or idea or tendency our intellect may choose to dangle enticingly before our desiring eyes. In this way man is delivered over to his conscious side, and reason becomes the arbiter of right and wrong, of  good and evil. I am far from wishing to belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty. But in the role of absolute tyrant it has no meaning —no more than light would have in a world where its counterpart, darkness, was absent. Man would do well to heed the wise counsel of the mother and obey the inexorable law of nature which sets limits to every being. He ought never to forget that the world exists only because opposing forces are held in equilibrium. So, too, the rational is counterbalanced by the irrational, and what is planned and purposed by what is.

In Diagram 2 the black point in the centre marks our ego; surrounded and sustained by consciousness, it represents the side of the psyche which, especially in our Western culture, is primarily oriented towards adaptation to outward reality. ‘By the ego,’ says Jung, ‘I understand a complex of representations which constitutes the centre of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a very high degree of continuity and identity.’ He defines consciousness as ‘the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents with the ego.’ All our experience of the outer and inner world must pass through our ego in order to be perceived.

C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung - Freud Letters, 216–217.

The next circle shows the sphere of consciousness, surrounded by contents lying in the unconscious, contents that have been set aside for our consciousness can hold only a very few contents at once - but which at any time can be restored to the level of consciousness, and also contents that we repress because they are disagreeable to us for various reasons - in other worlds, ‘forgotten, repressed, subliminally perceived, thought, and felt matter of every kind.’ Jung calls this sphere the personal unconscious to distinguish it from the collective unconscious, as shown in Diagram 3. The collective part of the unconscious does not include personal acquisitions specific to our individual ego, but only contents resulting ‘from the inherited possibility of psychical functioning in general, namely from the inherited brain structure. This heritage is common to all human beings, perhaps even to all animals, and constitutes the foundation of every individual psyche.

Edward F. Edinger, The Aion Lectures, p. 42.